US State (A’s) GOP just updated their platform to include the following: a penalty reduction for possessing less than an ounce of marijuana (these offenses will now be civil, not criminal, charges, payable by a fine of no more than $100), expanded access to medicinal marijuana (giving doctors the ability to determine the appropriate use of cannabis), urging Congress to remove cannabis from the list of Schedule 1 drugs, and a call to pass legislation for the increased cultivation and sale of hemp. That’s a pretty progressive hypothetical state, huh?

Then you have US State (B), which just increased its marijuana-related arrests by more than 20 percent between 2016 and 2017. US State (B) also finds itself in the top six states in the country for marijuana-related arrests, even though eight out of ten state citizens support decriminalization of marijuana.

I lied. This isn’t a hypothetical situation. One of these states is Virginia, and the other one is Texas. Take a guess which state is which.

Bad news it is, Virginia.

The Commonwealth’s state legislature is officially more antiquated than the Texas GOP – top marks. And the cherry on top? Texas Republicans followed the same Virginia model, which allows doctors to determine appropriate cannabis use for their patients, and is now effectively leaving the Commonwealth in the dust.

Virginia NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) Executive Director, Jenn Michelle Pedini, is the Commonwealth’s brain trust regarding all marijuana legislation in the state, from the painfully frustrating to the optimistically hopeful.

Let’s start with the frustrating first. Unlike states such as Colorado and California, which have passed marijuana legislation through voter initiatives, Virginians will have to pass marijuana legislation through the legislature.

“It’s not the governor, it’s not the bill sponsor themselves,” Pedini said. “It really comes down to the Senate Courts of Justice Committee and the House Courts of Justice Committee. And in the House there’s a subcommittee called House Courts of Justice Subcommittee One, which most know as the House Criminal Law Subcommittee. That’s the sticking point. That’s where marijuana reform goes to die.”

Pedini goes on to say that she hopes Republicans would want to get out in front of the decriminalization issue in 2019, but sees the drive to do so isn’t there. Nonetheless, there is a reason to be hopeful as voters look to 2020, which Pedini believes will be the year that sweeping changes and progress are made.

“The general idea is that we can do it in the 2019 session and Republicans could have that win, or we could do it in 2020 legislature, which is going to be a vastly different makeup,” Pedini said. “It’s almost a no-brainer. We’re going to see candidates campaign much more heavily on marijuana policy reform, both at the state and the federal level.”

She feels confident about marijuana reform in 2020, as she predicts there will be a much younger legislature. “Regardless of which party is in control, we’re going to have younger folks in office,” Pedini said. “The reason why we don’t have the reforms that the overwhelming majority of Virginians demand for is simple: Virginians continue to reelect the same conservative prosecutors to represent them in the General Assembly, and those folks are unwilling to move on this issue.”

Pedini discussed the not-so-hypothetical scenario in a very real Virginia, in which law enforcement arrested 27,852 people for marijuana-related offenses in 2017, up by almost 6,000 arrests from the previous year. “While the rest of the country is drastically decreasing their marijuana enforcement either because of decriminalization efforts at municipal or state levels or because of regulating use at the state level, Virginia is moving in the opposite direction,” Pedini said. “And that is not at all in context with what the overwhelming majority of Virginians want.”

Additionally, there are enormous financial benefits can come from state-regulated marijuana sales. Pedini mentioned Pueblo County in Colorado, which is using tax money from marijuana sales to help students pay for college. Pueblo County Commissioner Sal Pace told the local CBS-affiliate station that only a few years ago, “These are dollars that would have been going to the black market, drug cartels. Now money that’s used to fund drug cartels is now being used to fund college scholarships.”

For Pedini, the financial side of regulated marijuana sales is an obvious bonus, but there is a greater concern. “I think more importantly than the tax incentive around regulated marijuana sales is the public safety that comes with regulated sales,” she said. “What we are saying as a state with every year that we don’t regulate the sale of marijuana is that we would prefer drug dealers be the regulators of this industry. We know that drug dealers don’t I.D. before they sell marijuana. We know that in states that have regulated sales of marijuana, they do.”

Virginia seems to have a disorder where no amount of research or facts can break through. “There’s not a lack of data of what happens with states post-regulation,” Pedini said. “We have that in abundance now. It’s more the ability to maintain the current systems that currently profit from maintaining marijuana as illegal. It’s an easy arrest. It’s a way to search people’s cars and homes. Notably, its a way to funnel a significant amount of dollars into the state’s substance abuse program.”

Another inconvenient truth from the 2017 Virginia State Police report? African-Americans in Virginia are arrested for marijuana possession at a rate that is more than three times the rate of whites. Unfortunately, the ACLU has found in their research that this isn’t just a problem in Virginia. Nationally, blacks are 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than whites despite usage being equal between races.

Pedini also discussed the state’s substance abuse program, as it is inexorably linked to the national opioid crisis. She said that in Virginia, “Marijuana possession alone is enough to have you ordered to rehab” if you go through the first-time offenders’ program. “Sadly, you’re going to take up the space in that program for someone who has an opiate or heroin use disorder,” she said. “We could immediately double access to treatment for opiate use disorder by ending the courtroom-to-rehab pipeline for pot possession.”

Pedini said predicting what we will see in Virginia in ten years time is difficult since it depends so much on how federal policy shifts and who controls the state legislature. “A shift in federal policy, regardless of controlling party, is likely enough to push Virginia in the direction of regulating adult use,” she said. “We take a lot of money from the federal government and we’re never going to do anything that inhibits our ability to receive those federal dollars.”

Finally, when asked what we as citizens can do to bring this change more quickly, Pedini bluntly stated, “Vote” before the question was even finished. Is it really that simple? Yes.

“If you keep re-electing people who don’t support the reforms you want, you aren’t going to get the reforms that you want,” Pedini said.

If your priorities line up with the work that Virginia NORML is doing, there’s only one thing to do this November: get out and vote. Find out which candidates support marijuana legislation reform in Virginia and make your voice heard.

Hanover County, just north of Richmond, has about 88,000 white residents, and in an average year, 246 whites are arrested there for marijuana possession. That represents a rate of 280 white arrests for every 100,000 white residents.

About 9,600 African-Americans also live in Hanover County, and in an average year, 171 Black people are arrested there for marijuana possession. That represents a rate of 1,779 black arrests for every 100,000 black residents
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Statistically, that means African Americans are more than six times as likely as whites to be arrested for possessing marijuana in Hanover County.

That is an extreme example of a pattern throughout Virginia: Statewide, Black people are about three times as likely as whites to be arrested on marijuana charges, according to a Capital News Service analysis of data from the Virginia State Police.

The analysis looked at records on more than 160,000 arrests by local and state law enforcement agencies from 2010 through 2016. It found that the racial disparity in marijuana arrest rates has increased over the years: In 2010, the arrest rate for Black people was 2.9 times the arrest rate for whites; in 2016, Black people were 3.2 times as likely as whites to be arrested on marijuana charges.

The statistics suggest that in many localities, the enforcement of marijuana laws has a disproportionate impact on African-Americans – even though studies show that Black and white people use marijuana at roughly the same rates.

Previous studies by other groups also found differences in marijuana arrest rates between Blacks and whites. In 2015, for example, the Drug Policy Alliance, which supports legalizing marijuana, issued a report on “racial disparities in marijuana arrests in Virginia” between 2003 and 2013.

“Black Virginians have been disproportionately impacted by marijuana law enforcement despite constituting only 20% of the state’s population and using marijuana at a similar rate as white Virginians,” the study found.

The report was written by Jon Gettman, a criminal justice professor at Shenandoah University in Winchester, VA, and a researcher and analyst of marijuana policy issues. In explaining the racial disparities, he said marijuana possession is a crime of indiscretion, meaning people get arrested because they’re at the wrong place at the wrong time.

“It’s not necessarily that the minority group of blacks are targeted for increased arrests but that the areas where they live have a lot more police patrols and a lot more police activity,” Gettman said. “I think it may have a lot to do with where police patrols are more frequent and where policing is more aggressive – and that may very well be because there’s more crime in particular regions.”

Arresting disproportionate numbers of black people

The Virginia localities with the biggest differences between Black and white arrest rates for marijuana were communities with relatively few African-Americans, such as Carroll County in the southwestern part of the state and the city of Poquoson, north of Hampton.

In those localities, a handful of arrests of Black people can make the arrest rate seem astronomical. In Colonial Heights, for example, the marijuana arrest rate for Black people was more than 7,000 per 100,000 population – compared with less than 800 per 100,000 residents for whites.

But even in Virginia’s more populous localities with sizable African-American populations, Black people were much more likely than whites to be arrested on marijuana charges:

In Fairfax County, for every 100,000 African-American residents, 861 were arrested for marijuana possession during an average year. In contrast, for every 100,000 white residents, 265 were arrested. This means that the black arrest rate was 3.2 times the arrest rate for whites.

An even larger disparity exists in Arlington, where Black people were arrested at a rate of 1,173 per 100,000 population, while whites were arrested at a rate of just 145 per 100,000 population. There, the Black arrest rate is eight times the white arrest rate.

In Lynchburg, Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Alexandria and Newport News, the Black arrest rate was four to five times the white arrest rate.

In Hanover County, where the Black arrest rate for marijuana possession was 6.4 times the white arrest rate, officials from the local NAACP have met with representatives of the county sheriff’s department and the Ashland police to discuss various issues – but not marijuana law enforcement.

“The last time we met, we had a complaint that African-Americans are being stopped on (Route) 360 more so than whites, and they do acknowledge that more African-Americans are stopped based on profiles that they’re looking for,” said Robert Barnette, who chairs the political action committee of the Hanover County branch of the NAACP.

“We are on the (Interstate) 95 corridor for drug traffic … Hanover is between Richmond and D.C. The typical person that may go on to travel on 95 going north to D.C will get on Highway 301 or 295 and try to avoid some of the attention.”

The apprehension of people from out of town may explain the disparity in arrest rates, law enforcement officials say.

Lt. Kerri Wright of the Hanover County Sheriff’s Department noted that not everyone arrested in the county is a Hanover resident. The state of Virginia as a whole, in addition to the Hanover County area, is often seen as a drug corridor with its placement between New York and Florida, Wright said.

She said she couldn’t give an opinion on any racial disparities in marijuana arrests in the county.

“Our community is very supportive of us, and that’s one thing we’re very proud of,” Wright said. “There’s no push (to crack down on marijuana), but the law is the law. So we cannot state what laws we’re going to enforce and what laws we’re not going to enforce. If there’s a law and we know there’s a violation of a law, then we need to take appropriate law enforcement action.”

Some people who have been arrested for marijuana possession suspect that socioeconomic factors may influence where marijuana laws are enforced.

Gray Marshall, 19, was arrested on marijuana charges twice while attending Varina High School in the east end of Henrico County. Although Marshall is white, the school’s population is predominantly Black. He said being a young person in a “bad” part of town might increase the chances of being arrested.

“The second time I was in a bad area, and the cops said I just stuck out like a sore thumb. I was in a Honda sitting in an apartment complex. I got possession with intent to distribute,” Marshall said. “I feel like I was definitely more likely (than a Black person) to talk a cop out of something whenever we would get in a situation. But it felt pretty much the same.”

Twenty-six states and the District of Columbia have laws that legalize marijuana in some form.

Three other states will soon join them – but not Virginia, where the General Assembly recently rejected most proposals to liberalize marijuana laws.

While marijuana possession arrests have decreased nationally, Gettman found that arrests in Virginia increased steadily from 2003 to 2013. He said this might have been a reaction from Virginia law enforcement because of more liberal marijuana laws around the country. They may want to send a message to counterbalance the idea that marijuana is acceptable.

It was the arrests of Black people that made up most of the overall increase in marijuana arrests, Gettman said.

“It’s sort of now an accepted fact that there’s a tremendous disparity in arrests between whites and Blacks. In some respects, it doesn’t matter why there’s a racial disparity. The numbers show us that there is one, and consequently it’s clear that we’re not able to enforce these laws evenly, equally, fairly – and that’s a problem, and people are upset about it,” Gettman said.

“We can all have opinions about why this is the case, but the reality is this is the case.”